That Little Bit of Knowledge That Makes Everything Work

Entries for the ‘Linux’ Category

Anyone who has a file server or just a lot of disks in a workstation knows that the best and most reliable way to connect them is with a proper server grade HBA or RAID card, usually with a chipset made by LSI, such as the famous SAS2008. One thing you may have noticed is […]

After selecting “No automatic updates” in the Ubuntu 16.04 server installer, I expected that the system would not attempt to upgrade anything without my permission, just like every version before. Turns out that is not the case. I found out the hard way when my production database shut down to upgrade in the middle of […]

zfs-auto-snapshot not being available for 16.04 was not a situation I thought I would run into, yet here we are, disappointed by Canonical once again. In the meantime, I have ported the package from Trusty (14.04.5) to work on Xenial (16.04.1) and Debian Jessie. You can download the Ubuntu 16.04 package here, and install it by […]

ZFS is great. We hear it all the time, but you hope you will never need to utilize any of it’s advanced data-protecting features. I recently went through a series of events which makes me truly grateful for ZFS. This is a real world example that would have gone horribly different if I wasn’t using ZFS. It’s […]

Update 4/8/2017: This issue is actually caused by an underlying memory allocation deadlock bug in the ib_mthca kernel driver. The only true fix is to buy new hardware which does not use that driver and instead uses mlx4_ib. The following is left up for reference. For the last 6 months, I’ve had the most frustrating issue […]

A while ago when I switched from GNOME Shell to Unity, the first thing to bug me was the volume control in the top panel. When I would drag it side to side, it wouldn’t slide smoothly, instead it would jitter and jump back and forwards. This made it almost impossible to select the correct […]

I use an SSD and can’t install all my Steam games onto my SSD. I don’t have a large HDD in my workstation as all my files are on my huge ZFS file server. I simply wanted to install Steam games onto the share. Seems simple, right? I used to bind (using mount) the steamapps […]

I’ve used my fair share of media players and organisers in my life, on both Windows and Linux platforms. I thought I’d take you through my journey to discovering the best of them all. Back when I was a young child, I can vaguely remember using Windows Media Player 6 casually, but as soon as […]

When searching for a product in the likes of the Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black, I came across a much lesser known board known as the Cubieboard. The board is made by CubieTech, a company headed by a former employee of Allwinner technology, Tom Cubie. Recently a new model of the board went up […]

Yesterday I assembled a new ZFS array. It’s a 7x 1TB SATA RAID-Z1 array. Having to replace a failed drive within the first hour of the array’s life, I decided adding a hot spare would be a good idea. After installing it in the server (hotplugging) I checked with dmesg that it was detected as […]